Writing on the Green:
The Hamline Summer Writing Workshop
Write. Learn. Experiment. Restore. Engage. Experience all of this and more at Hamline's intensive residential retreat set on the campus of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. At the annual Summer Writing Workshop, you will experience a deep immersion in the process and craft of writing with nationally known authors in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Students choose to commute to class each day or can stay on St. Olaf's picturesque campus. Those who stay on campus can use the free time to write, read, hike, or socialize.
Students will spend their afternoons in focused study of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. Mornings are open to write, relax, or take advantage of the rich prairie, wetlands, and woodlands surrounding St. Olaf, or the lively charm of historic downtown Northfield.
2013 Visiting Faculty:
 NEW FOR 2013
We are excited to introduce a new genre section for the Summer Writing Workshop, beginning July 2013.
FANTASY with Emma Bull
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July 2013 Visiting Faculty
FANTASY
Emma Bull is the author of eight novels of science fiction and fantasy, including Territory (2011), her most recent. War for the Oaks, which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, is considered a pioneering work of urban fantasy. She has participated in Terri Windling's Borderland shared universe, which is the setting of her novel, Finder. Her post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, Bone Dance, was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. She has also been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, an the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature. She and her husband Will Shetterly created the shared universe of Liavek, for which they have both written stories. Both are also members of the Interstate Writers' Workshop known as The Scribblies. Emma plays guitar and sings in the Flash Girls, a goth-folk duo, with the Fabulous Lorraine Garland on fiddle. The Flash Girls have recorded three albums.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Impossible Reality
Fiction isn't true; everyone knows that. But fiction requires that readers trust the author enough to suspend their disbelief, to pretend for the space of a book that those characters live, that place is real, those events happened. Writers of science fiction and fantasy ask for even more: believe the impossible. In this workshop, we'll explore the skills and techniques that make readers believe. They may not be the ones you expect . . . . Bring your work-in-progress, or start a new project at the workshop. Novels and short fiction are both welcome. We'll spend some time reading and commenting on each other's stories, discussing the work of other authors, and testing our discoveries in assignments and exercises.
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POETRY
Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of over twenty-four books, including several award-winning books for young adults. Her latest collection is Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011 from Louisiana State University Press. Nelson was recently named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and also received the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. She was a National Book Award finalist for The Homeplace and The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems. Her numerous children's books include Carver: A Life in Poems, which received a Newbery Honor Award, a Coretta Scott King Honor Award, ono the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award; and A Wreath For Emmett Till, which won a Michael L. Printz Honor Award and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award. Other awards include two NEA fellowships, the Connecticut Arts Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Twice she was a finalist for the National Book Award. Nelson is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Connecticut and held the office of Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Out of the Comfort Zone: From Material to Craft
During this week we will draft no fewer than four or five linked poems based on information we will learn together and on specific formal requirements. Our goal will be to write PAST our first and most often used impulses and writing strategies, and into some uncharted and exciting discoveries, led beyond our habitual subject interests by fact and craft. Bring a poem or two you've been struggling with to discuss on the first day. Be prepared to generate and discuss new poems each subsequent day. Expect to be encouraged to care about rhyme, meter, and other traditional aspects of poetic form.
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FICTION
Wells Tower is the author of the short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected by Michiko Kakutani as one of her ten best books of 2009. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, The Believer, and elsewhere. He is a correspondent for GQ magazine. His awards include two Pushcart Prizes, the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review, and a National Magazine Award for fiction. He was also included in The New Yorker's list of twenty promising fiction writers under forty. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Small Lever, Big Rock: Short fiction & the Simple Machines of Emotion
As a short story writer, it is your job, in a very small space, to persuade us to care about people who don't exist doing things that never happened and, at the last full stop, to leave us knowing more, or feeling more, about what it means to be human. Drawing on examples from Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, Richard Yates, Barry Hannah and others, we'll handle and discuss a few of the short story writer's tools--voice, restraint v. revelation, plot and tone. We will devote the balance of class time to discussions of student writing. Class participants should bring workshop submissions of 7-20 pages, and be prepared to offer intelligent, constructive feedback on the work of other students.
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CREATIVE NONFICTION
Toi Derricotte is the author of five books of poetry, the latest being The Undertaker's Daughter (2011). Her literary memoir The Black Notebooks won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Two of her essays, "Beginning Dialogues" and "Beds" were included in The Best American Essays. Her awards include the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement; the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry; two Pushcart Prizes; the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; and fellowships from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a co-founder, with Cornelius Eady, of Cave Canem Foundation. She is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Using the Poet's Techniques in Writing Creative Nonfiction
To write well, we need to be fully present, open to the beauty and the pain, the glorious and the wretched. Writing gives us a way to transform our losses. It's an active, rather than a passive process. And one in which we become makers, creators, rather than objects being acted upon. This is a time to delve deeply into our work without distractions and interruptions. Toi will offer talks on aspects of writing applicable to both poetry and memoir. We will pay special attention to the craft of poetry and what memoirists can learn from poets that is useful in their own work. This is an opportunity to meet the words that gestate within us and to engage our greatest resources-attention, courage, precision-in bringing them into being. We will strive for language that is accurate, fresh, and interesting in itself, and we will work to create prose whose form, rhythm, language, and meaning work as an effective whole
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St. Olaf College
St. Olaf College rests on a beautiful 345-acre campus. Adjacent to the main campus are 700 acres of land, including woodlands, prairies, wetlands, and farmlands. A walk around campus could take you from Norway Valley through dense woods, across open prairie to the shore of a small wetland. It is a setting conducive to reflection, writing, and simple appreciation of the campus’ natural beauty. Northfield is less than an hour’s drive from the Twin Cities, so that students wishing to commute may do so. Dining in St. Olaf’s impressive student center is provided by Bon Appetit. www.stolaf.edu
Explore St. Olaf's prairies, woodlands, wetlands, and trails.
Photo via www.stolaf.edu
Visiting Northfield: http://www.visitingnorthfield.com
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